This morning, from roughly 9am to 11am, Spanish time, there was solar eclipse. Here in northern Spain, it was expected to reach a peak of 80% eclipsage (should be a word). While jadedly pessimistic, I left all my cameras charging the night before, and got up a little earlier than usual to make sure they were going to be set up properly. What greeted me upon raising the blinds in the morning was a thick fog. I couldn’t see to the end of my street, let alone to the sun or moon. “Dammit, Cantabria!”, I shouted as I shook my fists…and tweeted.(more…)

The moon just after sunset today was really gorgeous, hanging there in the sky next to Venus. The new moon was on Christmas Eve night, so Rudolph’s nose must have been extra important this year. After seeing the pretty Moon, up high in the sky, I told myself to go and look in an hour or two to see if I could catch it approach the horizon. Normally, I would never be capable of such a thing, but I actually did remember, and I caught it just as it was touching the horizon. Unfortunately, in the time it took me to set up my tripod, the tip of the moon went behind the hill on the horizon, but I still got nine shots in the time it took to set completely.(more…)

When I saw yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, I was fascinated by just how big the Earth’s shadow is on the Moon. When I made a comment to this effect on Facebook, my friend, Josh Grady, said, “It’d depend on the distance between the two, no?” Of course the size of a shadow depends on the distance to the object its cast upon, but I hadn’t considered that the distance from the Earth to the Moon varies, due to its slightly elliptical orbit around the Earth-Moon barycenter, by 42,840 km, causing it to appear 12% smaller at its apogee than at its perigee. This raised the question: What are the minimum and maximum sizes of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon?